How Militarized Did the U.S. Navy Make Their Dolphins?

Dolphins have seen action in the Vietnam War, Bahrain, the Persian Gulf in 2003, and they even helped provide security for the Republican National Convention of 1996, which took place at the waterside San Diego Convention Center.

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The U.S. isn’t alone in training military dolphins. Starting in 1965, the Soviet Union had tried to at a Black Sea port near Sevastopol, in Crimea.

When the USSR collapsed, “ownership was transferred to Ukraine, where it was kept afloat by switching to civilian tasks like working with disabled children,” according to a Russian news agency, reported by Wired ( the collapse of the Soviet Union had also led to the U.S.’s downsizing its own program). But apparently those dolphins were based in Crimea, which was annexed by Moscow last year, so now they’re under Russian military control.

Last year, Russian media and others reported that the U.S. was sending some of its dolphins to Ukraine in response to the ongoing crisis there with Russia, a claim that the U.S. adamantly denied.

See a news report about that below:

In 2010, the Navy sent dolphins to Washington state, according to Navy spokesman Chris Haley. Dolphins are still used there now as “part of our security force,” Haley told Business Insider.

Thankfully for the dolphins, the Navy is planning to faze them out by 2017. The Navy now has a robotic system to take over their jobs.

But it seems nothing is safe from our wars, even animals that have nothing to do with why we would be at war in the first place. At least the Navy is planning to phase them out.

For more about why the Navy is phasing out their use of dolphins, see below: